The Insider News

The Insider News is for breaking IT and Software development news. Post your news, your alerts and
your inside scoops. This is an IT news-only forum - all off-topic, non-news posts will be
removed. If you wish to ask a programming question please post it
here.

Get The Daily Insider direct to your mailbox every day. Subscribe
now!

If it were before in the day I would drink another coffee... now I think I will just grab a

M.D.V.

If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.

Security awareness training specialist KnowBe4 has carried out a survey of 2,600 IT professionals to look at how organizations are managing passwords and determine how the proposed passphrase concept stacks up against methods currently in use.

has carried out a survey of 2,600 IT professionals to look at how organizations are managing passwords

For that no survey was needed... the answer is "bad"

M.D.V.

If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.

HyperCard brought into one sharp package the ability for a Macintosh to do interactive documents with calculation, sound, music and graphics. It was a popular package, and thousands of HyperCard “stacks” were created using the software.

I have The Complete Hypercard Handbook. I think that was one of the coolest pieces of software ever written. I had hoped to recreate it at one point with Intertexi, but never got far with it. Wish there were people willing to donate their scarce free time for no compensation to work on a product that may never find a market in a language (C#) that many open source programmers, especially those youngins, disdain.

Imagine a web-based version of Hypercard where you could share cards, decks, etc. If something like that exists, I don't know about it.

Supercapacitors promise recharging of phones and other devices in seconds and minutes as opposed to hours for batteries. But current technologies are not usually flexible, have insufficient capacities, and for many their performance quickly degrades with charging cycles. Researchers have found a way to improve all three problems in one stroke.

One of the sources of the bloats in software are the layers of general purpose libraries that a specific software depends upon. Maybe only 1% or less of the said libraries are actually used for the specific tasks of the software, but they (the libs) all consumes resources according to their general settings nevertheless. As the number of the layers grow, the resource wasted also grow exponentially.

It would be better if the next generation of language, compilers and/or linkers could be such that it's possible to enable the software production process to be smart enough to extract only the needed bits of the generic parts (of the software) to produce the final result, like what is done in the early days in which things are simple enough that everything can be build up from ground just for the specific tasks of a software ...

There still is - its called the linker. Link to static libraries and only the parts used (directly or indirectly) are pulled into your program (especially with Whole Program Optimisation).

Even better, using Modern C++ many libraries are "header only", in these cases the optimiser can sometimes work wonders - eliminating entire sequences of function calls and replacing it with the value where that can be determined statically.

(Nix'd by Code Wraith)

"If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough."
Alan Kay.

Well, the OS. And the fact that everything has to be connected now, using various data stores (local, cloud, SQL, NoSQL, key-value, etc), and we have to deal with internationalization, translation, multiple devices, complex UI's (come now, how complicated was it when you had an 80x25 character display, if you were lucky), and everything has gotten faster -- from data feeds to demand for data (we're no longer putting you on hold on your analog phone line while we get your insurance folder from the file cabinet, you know).

So these aren't problems, they are solutions to problems that create their own problems. Um, ok, they are problems.

What are some potential solutions?

Solar flare? Nuclear war? Military state? The real problem is that people want more, and want it faster. Oh, and everything is entertainment nowadays.

I know. Less government regulation! Less government! I mean, geez, you should see the hoops we have to go through in the insurance industry!

Or is is just inevitable that we'll keep writing software to fill up the ever-expanding space those amazing hardware engineers keep coming up with?

Yes. To deal with it, invent new technology that sucks up more processing power, memory, and data storage, but makes it simpler to program and use.

Basically, the processing power, RAM, and storage requirements are where we shove the problem of "how much and how fast" so we can do cool things like land the first stage of a rocket back on earth and re-use it.